APFS Restore to HDD?

Hey guys!

I'm on 1.7.8 and I'm doing some testing on Late 2014 Mac Minis with 1TB HDD. I've successfully been able to format the HDD as APFS and create an APFS image from a same model machine, but when I try to restore the image to an HDD, I get "Cannot find a valid disk for restoration (SSD and not current boot drive.)" Anyone have any tips on how to make DeployStudio restore to a HDD instead of an SSD?

Apologies in advance if I was supposed to be a reply to rtrouton's post. I figure my question warranted a new thread as he was looking to replicate an SSD in VM and I was trying to restore to a physical HDD.

Re: APFS Restore to HDD?

If I understand the log correctly DSruntime will check for SSD, and refuse to restore APFS if it finds an HDD.This is in line with the defaults as Apple does at upgrading (see HT208018).

It is not clear (at least to me) why HDD are not APFS by default, in beta's APFS worked, and the APFS specs state that HDD are supported.Apple defaults to HFS for HDD, I think there are good reasons to do so, so you must be brave to do differently.

I can understand the need for uniformity (all 10.13 system use APFS) , but without knowing the reasons behind Apple's advice, I would recommend to stay with Apple's advice, and for deploystudio that means:-two different workflows for Mac's with SSD or HDD (and fusion)-two different master images (.hfs.dmg and .apfs.dmg) (luckily AutoDMG will have the option to produce both in the near future, see Macadmins slack #autodmg)

Re: APFS Restore to HDD?

So I put in a request to the AutoDMG people to give an option to choose HFS+ or APFS. They are going to add this but listen to what he said about DS stopping APFS images being to deployed to spinning disk:

"MagerValp:The GM dropped and the release notes confirm that APFS will be unsupported on some 3 TB Fusion Drive setups, so I'm adding an HFS option. Note that APFS is supported on spinning disks, it's only automatic conversion during install that isn't, so I think it's unwise for DeployStudio to block that." https://github.com/MagerValp/AutoDMG/issues/187#issuecomment-329698895

So it looks like apple supports APFS on spinning disks but not on some 3TB fusion drives. Maybe DS can check for this instead and let APFS images be deployed to spinning disks?

Re: APFS Restore to HDD?

I've been able to get a hold of an external Samsung SSD (MU-PT250B) to test with and I've run across a new problem. After booted into the DS NetBoot image, I select the restore image workflow then select the external SSD and APFS image, but after I press the "play" button, the DS Runtime quits, a Terminal window opens, and nothing happens.